A Performance Evaluation on the Blockchain-based Traceability Application of Pharmaceutical Supply Chain: A Case Study

Blockchain is a disruptive technology known for its security features and continuous development. Despite blockchain’s notable features, such as immutability, it is still a compelling solution for various industry use cases. Albeit technical hitches such as network overload are still of concern to use this technology in an enterprise context. Some factors to consider include high transaction throughput and low latency. This study focuses on developing a blockchain-based web application that focuses on a specific industry use case, in this case, the distribution and recall transactions of the pharmaceutical supply chain. Since the pharmaceutical supply chain suffers from frequent visibility problems, blockchain is a suitable solution for this use case. After developing the application, performance testing was done to determine the system’s throughput, latency, and scalability performance. Three use cases were tested explicitly by different transaction rates (tps), the total number of transactions, and the number of simultaneous transactions in the simulated test environment. For every performance test, two transaction types were done: the invoke and query transactions. The study showed that a blockchain system’s hardware configuration heavily impacted the system’s overall performance through the blockchain’s latency, throughput, and scalability. These factors depend on the configuration of the system, the network design of the blockchain, and the complexity of the operations of the smart contract.